Each with our own view

Tonight at dinner we talked about the trip in the fall. It started by Calvin asking the place each person is most looking forward to visiting (me-Islesboro; C-NYC; E and M didn't answer). It's interesting to hear the kids' concerns and ideas. They both wanted to know who is teaching what. They are both really excited for "interesting" and "fun" science lessons. I'm not sure what they have in mind; they weren't able to articulate it. Eleanor is full of organizational ideas (e.g., binders and notebooks and such) and project ideas (e.g., writing reports about shells found on the beach and doing projects related to the history of the places we visit). She also asked if we could go to Salem. I'm not sure if we will or not, but I'm happy to see her thinking about the trip and eager to see things. As she will say herself, she's really into history.

Calvin surprised me tonight by putting forward his first homeschool work negotiation. He had been talking about how excited he is to go to New York City because "people say it is a great city." A couple minutes later he asked if he could do "a lot a lot a lot" of work in advance of being in NYC so that he doesn't have to do school work in NYC and miss out on fun there. It was a surprise to hear that he both recognizes that work will have to be done next year and that he is so interested in the travel that he doesn't want school work to take away from it. It reminded me of a homeschooling book that I read that said that one might need to start homeschooling by telling the kids that there is no schooling going on. From there the kids can be shown how homeschool can offer opportunities to engage with what interests them. I told Calvin that school work is not going to get in the way of our seeing any sites while we're on our trip. I told him that we'll all learn about the places we visit together.

I'd say we're all getting very excited.

New Blog

Welcome to this blog!

We've created a new blog for two reasons. First, we had the silly system of permissions on the old blog because it had both our names and our calendar of travel on it. (Yes, I was a little paranoid!) Second, the other blog started getting a little personal. It was more of public diary than I intended it to be. So, now I'll keep it as a diary, but not public, and allow all the public to visit us here. I transferred some of the old posts over here.

You can look at our calendar below to see our travel plans. We'll update it as we know better what we're doing!